Managing Society: "Sovereign democracy" and Civil
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CEERS Working Papers 1/2021
https://doi.org/10.47669/CEERS-1-2021
Managing Society: “Sovereign democracy” and Civil
Society in Putin’s Russia
Aram TERZYAN*
This paper explores the interplay between “sovereign democracy”
and civil society in Putin’s Russia, with a focus on the challenges of a
vibrant civil society emergence.
While a vibrant civil society is largely viewed as a key component of
a democratic society and a crucial instrument for political change, the
Russian civil society organizations have been characterized by
organizational weakness, and marginality in terms of their social base,
financial assets and influence over policy making (Evans, 2011, p. 46).
Evans (2011) notes that this picture has much to do with the cultural
legacy of the Soviet system with pervasive distrust of social organizations
and even of the whole public sphere (p. 46). Indeed, it has not been
uncommon for post-Soviet societies to perceive civic associations as threat
to the power and stability of the state together with the conviction that the
state bears the responsibility for the wellbeing of the Society. Meanwhile,
the Putin regime has further reinforced such perceptions to thwart civic
activism and prevent it from evolving into an issue-specific, value- driven
and a robust civil society.
*
Aram Terzyan, PhD is research director of Los Angeles-based Center for East European
and Russian Studies of Eurasia Institutes. Email: a.terzyan@eurasiainstitutes.org .
1 CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021In Russia, mistrust in NGOs is widespread. Only one third of the
population trusts at least one sort of NGO, while only 8.9% trust civil
society as a whole (Stewart and Dollbaum, 2017). The polling agency
TsIRCON states that the share of people active in civil society has
stagnated since 2009, while the attitude towards NGOs has deteriorated
since then (Ibid).
In essence, mass participation and public involvement has played a
negligible role in Russian politics since the break-up of the Soviet Union,
with some minor exceptions, including the wave of mass anti-government
protests in 2011–2012 (Gelman, 2015, p. 38).
Convinced that foreign interference was at the heart of the protests
that had been mounted in major cities prior to his re-election, the Putin
government and an acquiescent Duma set forth new legislation that
required NGOs to turn down funding from abroad or else register as
‘foreign agents’ (Oliker, 2017). By eliminating this critical source of
support, the Foreign Agents Law weakened a core compponent of civil
society and provided a fertile ground for suppressing dissent and pluralism
(Ibid).
The Kremlin’s efforts at controlling te civil society has yielded
networks of government-organized nongovernmental organizations
(GONGOs) with close ties to state officials and dependent on state funding.
As a result, various scholars now see civil society as being almost
completely subordinated to the state, arguing that this “Russian-style” civil
society, or civil society po-russki, gives the state “a dominant, directing and
all-encompassing role with regard to civil society formation and
development” (Bindman, 2015).
2 CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021Managing Society: “Sovereign democracy” and Civil Society in Putin’s Russia
Notably, the ‘color revolutions’ in Russia’s neighborhood did not
appear to ‘inspire’ the Russian activists by prompting them into action.
Rather, the ‘color revolutions’, and especially the 2004 Orange Revolution
in Ukraine, served as a wake-up call for Putin’s regime and prompted the
Kremlin into taking all possible counter-revolutionary measures. The
result was the emergence of a mobilizational authoritarian regime during
Putin's second term (Hovarth, 2011).
To thwart the perceived color revolution threat, Russian authorities
adopted strategies that combined a political, administrative, and intellectual
assault on the opposition and Western ideas of democracy promotion
(Finkel and Brudny, 2012, p. 15).
An integral part of this assault was, first, an attempt to create a mass
youth movement, Nashi, as a counterweight to the various youth
movements that were the driving forces behind the ‘color revolutions’ in
Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Nashi, the independent youth democratic
anti-fascist movement emerged in 2005 as a pro-regime support group.
Some observers read it as Putin’s Russia’s one of the most controversial
projects, with its mass actions and youth in uniforms evoking memories of
the Soviet Komsomol (Hemment, 2015, p. 73).
While pretending to be an independent youth movement, Nashi was
state-run, with inherently anti-Western and anti-liberal ideas. Nashi was
claiming to adhere to seemingly incompatible values, combining the
elements of democratic discourse and global youth culture with nationalism
and “moral framework” of the Russian Orthodox Church (Hemment, 2015,
3 CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021pp. 72-73). Even though Nashi’s priorities would considerably change over
time in response to Kremlin’s shifting priorities, it did not cross the line of
a pro-regime counter-revolutionary movement, aimed at filling the public
space with nationalism and loyalty to the regime.
As a result, Nashi would passionately support the Putin’s regime, not
least through countering anti-Putin opposition demonstrations in Moscow
in December 2011 (Atwal and Bacon, 2011).
Not surprisingly, Nashi would be widely regarded as evidence of an
anti-democratic backlash and as confirmation of Russia's resurgent
authoritarianism (Hemment, 2012, p. 234). That said, Nashi had nothing to
do with a democratic civil society and served as a tool for controlling public
space and countering the opposition (p. 234).
There is a broad consensus, that Russia’s nationalism has been
shaped by a reaction to the West as Other, and by the Russian elite’s
interpretation of the West’s efforts to contain, marginalize, and weaken
Russia (Ziegler, 2016). In effect the Kremlin has consistently strived to
delegitimize the idea of liberal democracy itself, labelling it subversive and
alien to the Russian national character (Finkel and Brudny, 2012, p. 15).
Putin has tended to contend that the ideology underpinning Western
democracies for decades has "outlived its purpose". Thus, “the liberal idea
has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the
overwhelming majority of the population” (Putin, 2019).
Ironically, liberal democracy has been reduced to the acceptance of
homosexual rights, hailed by the Russian president as a “genderless and
fruitless tolerance” that allows “good and evil” to be valued as equal (Putin,
2013).
4 CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021Managing Society: “Sovereign democracy” and Civil Society in Putin’s Russia
Essentially, the West and particularly Europe have been regarded as
a purely LGBT-promoting communities that endanger national identities
and traditional values in the post-Soviet countries and beyond. In Putin’s
words the liberals have been attempting to dictate anything to anyone, thus
overshadowing the culture, traditions and traditional family values of
millions of people making up the core population (Putin, 2019).
Therefore, Putin has positioned Russia as a counter-hegemonic force
opposed to the West’s “crackdown” on conservative values and even
world’s last bastion of traditional values, characterized by its rejection of
revolutions, homosexuality, and feminism (Orlova, 2018, pp. 63-65).
This rhetoric goes into the heart of political homophobia, that is
viewed as “a purposeful [strategy], especially as practiced by state actors;
as embedded in the scapegoating of an “other” that drives processes of state
building and retrenchment; as the product of transnational influence‐
peddling and alliances; and as integrated into questions of collective
identity and the complicated legacies of colonialism. Specifically, we target
the overt deployment of homophobia in political rhetoric and policy as a
remarkably similar and increasingly modular phenomenon across a wide
range of cases” (Bosia and Weiss, 2013).
Apart from encouraging homophobia, Putin’s political homophobia
has led to further misrepresentation of liberal democracy - often contrasted
with Russian “sovereign democracy.” Remarkably, the narratives that
underpin Putin’s discourse have proven popular with the Russian
population. According to a survey conducted by the state-run Russian
5 CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021Public Opinion Research Centre, nearly two-thirds of Russians believe that
homosexuals are conspiring to subvert the country’s traditional values
(Terzyan, 2020). Moreover, they believe in the existence of an
organization that strives to destroy Russian spiritual values through
imposing radical minority norms on the country’s majority (Ibid).
Such perceptions allowed Putin to strengthen his “strongman” image,
with the president not allowing the Western
liberals to weaken Russia. This rhetoric is not uncommon in authoritarian
regimes, where leaders seek to strengthen their popularity by exploiting
nationalism, exaggerating external threats, and manipulating the media.
The necessity of standing up to the West has served as a convenient
pretext to suppress dissent and pluralism across the country by labelling
civic and opposition activists as “anti-Russian spies,” “foreign agents” or
“traitors,” who are involved in “Western conspiracies” (Duacé, 2015).
Moreover, the Russian government passed several laws aimed at shrinking
the public space by stigmatizing the core of the liberal-reform movement
as “foreign agents” fighting against traditional Russian values (Wilkinson,
2014).
Overall, Putin has tended to undermine the very idea of political
opposition, by implicitly representing it as an anti-state force that causes
instability, rife with devastation. Putin and other officials have made
frequent references to ‘fifth columns’ and ‘national traitors’ within Russia,
creating a besieged fortress mentality that sharpens divisions between those
supporting the Kremlin and those in opposition (Ziegler, 2016).
Meanwhile, individuals prominent in the nationalist opposition movement
have been singled out as traitors. Namely, in response to a question about
prominent opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Putin stated that Russians “do
6 CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021Managing Society: “Sovereign democracy” and Civil Society in Putin’s Russia
not want second edition of today’s Ukraine for Russia” (Putin, 2017).
Meanwhile, the Russian president would frame the Maidan Revolution as
a sign of “fascism revival,” asserting that those who stood behind the latest
events in Ukraine are nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-
Semites (Putin, 2014).
Such examples would help point to the hypothetical future of a strong
opposition, that would soon or late strive to stage a devastating revolution.
It turns out that considerable part of Russian population tends to share
Putin’s stances opposition. Remarkably, a Levada-Centre survey on the
necessity of political opposition found that 54 percent of respondents
thought Russia needed one, while a quarter disagreed with such ideas
(Levada, 2016). Reasons given by the second group against the
concept of political opposition ranged from concerns regarding
internal divisions to its perceived detrimental effects on the country’s
general stability (Levada, 2016).
Overall, respondents possessed largely negative and pessimistic
understandings of the official opposition in Russia, describing it as weak,
marginalized, fragmented and even a ‘dying species.
Even a quick glance of the Duma presents an unfavorable picture of
a fragmented opposition, divided by communist, nationalist, and liberal
ideologies. Ironically, only a shared distrust by the public appears to unite
these groups, with respondents often associating the parliamentary
opposition with terms such as “fake opposition”, “rubber stamp
opposition” and even “pro-regime” (Terzyan, 2020). Thus, it comes as
7 CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021no surprise, that at this point there seems to be no considerable hindrance
to Putin’s plan to stay in office.
In conclusion, to shield itself from a vibrant civil society and mass
mobilization, the Putin’s regime resorted to tightening its grip on the public
space and controlling public narratives on politically sensitive issues.
Along with filling the public space with fake democratic movements, such
as Nashi, the Kremlin has sought to delegitimize the very ideas of liberal
democracy, labelling them alien to the Russian national character. In effect,
there has been little to no room for a vibrant civil society advancement in
Putin’s Russia.
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10CEERS Working Papers | 2021 – number 1 | eurasiainstitutes.org | DOI: 10.47669/CEERS-1-2021You can also read
